


Holiday Pines

by nolaespoir



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Comfort/Angst, First Christmas, Holidays, M/M, Ugly Holiday Sweaters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 11:14:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5414699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolaespoir/pseuds/nolaespoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alone for the holidays, Arthur takes himself away to Aspen for Christmas, where he stumbles upon a certain forger he's been pining after, who isn't quite so alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holiday Pines

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first A/E fic, so I apologize for the rough take-off. Many eternal thanks to my lovely beta, kedgeree, who brought so much of what this fic became, to light. All the revising that went on afterward is un-beta'd, and all mistakes are my own. Also, many bows and groveling to EarlGreyTea68, who is entirely responsible for me discovering this delightful fandom.
> 
> I just wanted to write a sappy Christmas fic and instead I got this, so. Yes. Oops.

I.

 

Arthur checked into the St. Regis late on the 21st of December, straight off a long-haul flight from Paris to Denver, a chartered jet from Denver to Aspen. 

He hadn't slept—knew too well not to, when leapfrogging across so many time zones—and the hours of travel showed in the bruised skin under his eyes, in the way his hair had started to come loose, in the tight line of his mouth. But he was dressed just right—Marsèll boots, stamped free of snow, a Varvatos herringbone-weave coat, a flash of his TAG Heuer watch—and that was enough to make his exhaustion go unremarked upon. A _butler_ had taken his bags from him, carefully, upon arrival. Serapian, from Milan. Arthur’d had them for years, thought their mild distress made them look distinguished, thought maybe some day someone would say the same about him. 

He tried to stop his thinking at that, mindful of where (to whom) that particular trail of bread crumbs always, inevitably lead. 

The slight woman at Reception soothed Arthur’s weariness with an honest smile that crinkled and disappeared her small eyes. He’d put himself up in one of their Presidential suites, she saw, confirmed it was just him, that he’d be staying through the week. Arthur nodded, yes, yes, correct. A fire popped and crackled in the stone hearth off to his side beneath a garlanded mantel peppered with bright, glittering baubles. Somewhere “Greensleeves” was playing, drifting into the lobby like a whisper between old friends.

A couple passed through the front doors behind him smelling sweet and smoky—notes of Frédéric Malle and a log fire, a light dinner and too much whiskey and red wine late into the night. Arthur watched them journey across the lobby and shuffle ambitiously to the stairs. They leaned against each other, kept each other upright, and their faces never showed a hint of just how remarkable that was, that they had each other. That they weren’t alone.

A draft snaked its way in behind them from where the city burned cold and bright outside, where lights danced across snow banks and icicles, gleaming, gentling the cold with something like romance. It settled heavily over Arthur. He felt the chill somewhere deep, beneath his coat and sweater and flesh. 

This cool, delicate sterility—it was exactly everything the world expected of Arthur. And he knew that because he’d spent a professional lifetime ensuring it. The image of him—sharp, rich—it was his greatest work—a carefully built facade, fortified by years of diligence and a little imagination and a lot of smoke and mirrors. 

And absolutely no one knew. 

No one had seen behind the curtain, which was the point of the curtain, of course. That was his fault, his doing.

No one would suspect that he hated places like this, hated their clean, manufactured Christmas cheer; their heavy, cloying joviality. It was suffocating. 

It was luxurious, picturesque. Everything he’d want.

He felt out of place. 

He looked the part. 

It was his fault. 

If he was lying, there was no one left alive to say so. If the _Arthur_ the world knew was a role, if underneath the suits and the muscle and the bone beat a heart whole and different, who could say?

There had been one, once upon a time. A mother, his mother, kind and beloved. She would have tsk’d her tongue at such a palace and asked him who he thought he was, because she would have known. And coming home to her at Christmastime, he would’ve known, too. He would’ve remembered that there was a _him_ separate from all of that. She was his lighthouse. His touchstone. 

But she had died months ago and Arthur wondered if, perhaps, the truth of _him_ had died with her. 

He wondered if, perhaps, this was all he was now: armor-plated, impenetrable, filled up with other people’s stories about him. An efficient machine, good with a computer and better with a gun, who fucked without feeling and never missed anyone the next morning, who knew how to be alone, and who took himself on extravagant holidays because he fucking could. 

Evergreens and fresh powder, a deep winter’s night sky more purple than black, cable-knit sweaters and mulled wine. Chestnuts cracked open over a fire, or the smell of them, anyway, and something baking—cinnamon and sugar. Colorful packages wrapped by ingratiating store employees and placed under a tree with blinking lights and a glowing star on top.Arthur had come to Aspen because he had nowhere else to go, and this seemed like a place he should want to be.

He felt unmoored.

He felt there was nothing left to do but be consumed by his own myth. 

Arthur had built his bed. He’d lie it. He would finally be, wholly and completely, the person he’d fought so hard to convince the world he was in the first place, all alone.

 

 

II.

 

Morning dawned bright and cold and quick. It was barely past seven a.m. when Arthur blinked awake, desperate for a hot shower and hotter coffee. He rang down for a fix and a lovely large French press’ worth of coffee arrived at his door on a golden cart draped in white linen. He polished off three cups, black, settled into a chair he’d pulled close to a window. Aspen, too, was an early riser, and the wide streets outside were dotted with small, faraway figures laden with skis and poles, bright snowsuits, radiating full-wattage smiles. 

Sometimes Arthur pitied people and their ordinary lives, their soft faces blissfully un-lined by prolonged exposure to the machinations of sick, powerful men, the meanness governments and armies, drug cartels and desperate corporate CEOs. He pitied people who looked at a black diamond slope and said things like, “It really makes you feel alive, you know?” 

But other times, when his life was quiet and he was coffee-warm deep in his belly, and his hair was curling over his forehead, around his ears, he worried they probably knew something about living that he didn’t.

With an indulgent slowness, Arthur pulled himself away from the window and shuffled back into the bedroom to begin sifting through his wardrobe, which had been hung with care in the closet the night before. Arthur had made a point of it, to un-poise himself to flee. Hotels generally meant _work_ , and _work_ inevitably meant a packed bag by the door and a gun under the pillow, a second in the nightstand, a third in the bureau. Closed curtains and a DO NOT DISTURB sign. Swearing off room service. 

But not here. 

Here Arthur fingered the cotton, the silk, the cashmere he’d chosen with care from his stockpile in Paris, all hanging in a perfectly neat row.Here he took his time, imagined himself in each one before he settled on a clean white button up under a heather grey sweater, dark jeans, boots. He forwent hair gel and left his cell phone on the desk, grabbing only his coat and his wallet.Here maybe he’d go out for a stroll, maybe he’d go shopping. Maybe he’d do damn well whatever he wanted, and in no particular hurry.  

The lobby was different in the daylight, both more and less obvious in its charms. Strands of garland woven through with unlit fairy lights framed the doorways and windows. Large red velvet bows clung to light fixtures. The piano was louder, now, playing something childish and nostalgic over the squawks and squeals of young families in the dining room.A gingerbread replica of the hotel—a towering, tremendous structure plastered together with swirls of icing and twisted licorice rope, dotted with cinnamon candies and candy canes—that had been hidden by evening shadows the night before, now cut a striking figure in the morning’s light. The whole place smelled of maple syrup. 

Outside, Arthur’s breath hung in the air in great white puffs. The hotel was on the edge of town, a crimson brick beacon at the base of the mountains, framed with evergreens and empty Aspen trees, and the wide, quiet streets were dusted white. He wasn’t used to low buildings and quite so much sky, and he felt his chest open up in the face of it, this sprawl, this—for him—unmarred frontier. 

Towards the center of town sleek glass and brick storefronts promised all sorts of fine riches. Down South Galena Street: Dior, Zegna, Moncler. Brunello Cucinelli on East Cooper Avenue. Arthur thought: if ever he was going to be able to pull off a hooded leather parka, this was it. And $6,000 later, he did.

For a late breakfast Arthur stopped into a small cafe where he was sat by the window at a table meant for two. He examined the laminated menu and for a brief moment, lulled by the heavy scent of frying batter, he contemplated pancakes— a heaping stack soaked through with fresh whipped butter.

A little girl at the next table over smiled at him. She was missing her front teeth. Her mother was idly running her fingers through the girl’s thin blond hair while she poked at her own omelet and chatted easily to the man across the table. The man would nod, grin, crunch down on a strip of bacon, try and steal bites of this or that off of the little girl’s plate. She exclaimed with such zeal, “Daddy!” then stuck her fork into her waffle, tore away a bite, and held it out to him. He ate it with exaggerated enjoyment. 

Arthur had always considered breakfast to be the loneliest meal. 

Arthur was not the sort to settle for coffee and a pastry on his way to the warehouse. He woke early and went for a run, he showered and he put on his armor, and he made himself a small, careful feast: sprouted toast with steamed kale and a poached egg, goat milk yogurt with hemp seeds and fresh berries, a spinach and feta omelet with sundried tomatoes and asparagus. He ground his coffee, let it steep in his French press, fetched the paper from outside his door while everything was brewing. And then he sat, alone at his table, and let the rest of the world wake up. 

And mostly he was fine with it. 

But sometimes he wasn’t, and the utter loneliness of it struck him, and he couldn’t eat for the rest of the day.

Because the truth was—the truth Arthur kept very close and very quiet, was—that Arthur wanted to make breakfast with someone. He wanted to roll out of bed late and stand in a coffee-fumed kitchen still in his pajamas and know how someone else took their eggs. He wanted syrup-sweet, morning breath kisses and bedhead and slightly-burned-on-one-side-because-I-couldn’t-keep-my-hands-off-you chocolate chip pancakes.

A simple dream, maybe, for a man who spent his days constructing cities and worlds and lives in the blink of a drugged eye. 

But Arthur never could quite get his hands on it; it was unstable, and the dream collapsed each time he tried, like a bad job with a mark who realized too soon that he was dreaming. He’d find someone, or they’d find him, and they’d have their night together, him and this beautiful man from a beautiful city. But always, _always_ , it would dissolve with the job. Arthur had to run, had to be on the next train or plane or goddamn boat that would get him out of there, and vaguely apologetic texts sent from burner phones were no basis for a serious relationship. 

And even those were rare these days, those lust-fueled, make-believe romances. They took effort. Arthur was _particular_. 

So his list was short. It was filled with gaps, dry spells — weeks that turned to months that turned to… this. Arthur tried not to think about it too much, because if he thought about it, he’d think of the last, that certain one with crooked teeth and ill-fitting shirts, who had been the one to disappear this time. Who hadn’t even bothered with a text. 

It was the nature of the business, Arthur thought. It was the nature of people who were always striving to dream bigger. They were restless, kept their sights on a far horizon, and their loyalties were bought and sold with the sun. 

The stunning, stinging pain of that particular betrayal had been the thing to convince him: he needed to be the person who cared less. The memory of it strengthen his resolve.

A waitress made her way over and Arthur ordered the steel-cut oats.

 

The afternoon dragged on slowly after that, lurching forward in halting fits and starts. The temperature dropped and the air turned sharp, though the sun stayed out high in the clear blue sky. Arthur stopped into Yves Soloman and Louis Vuitton. The streets swelled with exhausted, endorphin-flushed skiers aching for a strong drink and a hot meal, and Arthur felt very apart from them.

He was not the sort to waste energy on feeling sorry for himself, usually. He did not consider himself one to pine. Nonetheless, there was _something_ that had lodged itself in his chest, something that made itself known with its weight with every step, hard to ignore.It was his ego that was hurt, probably. This is what he told himself, like it made him the kind of person who could he honest with himself. His ego was hurt—his pride was hurt. It was still smarting after all these months, and maybe it would do until he let someone else into his bed to wipe the memory clean. 

Back at the hotel Arthur watched couples returning from staged, wintery carriage rides, the apples of their cheeks ruddy and beautiful. Santa Claus waved at him in the lobby before stooping to sweep a giddy little girl into his arms, whose eyes went wide and her mouth small, in awe. More children bounced and clapped at his feet, and stole candy canes from his pocket before running back to their parents. Arthur couldn’t say exactly why he’d decided to come to Aspen, except maybe that he’d imagined it would be just like this.

Staff dressed in ornate elf costumes appeared to shepherd the children and their parents outside to the courtyard, where a Christmas tree reached 40 feet into the darkening sky and pulsed in flashes of red and green. Arthur followed behind, charmed and curious. Fire pits roared to life near lounge chairs and a station had been assembled to serve hot chocolate and mulled cider to the gathering crowd, warming and filling cold, empty hands with hot drinks. Steam curled off the cups and faded against the sharp air. 

Later, half a dozen children arranged themselves before the tree and began to sing. Their voices, out of key and sweet like only small voices are, drifted up and away, fading against the night’s sharp air like so much steam off a mug of cocoa. 

It began to snow.

People huddled close, bundling up in each other to block out the cold. Arthur watched the crowd, saw them press icy noses into warm necks, saw bare hands tuck into someone else’s pockets, saw people blink and smile at each other, humming along. 

The loneliness returned. 

Arthur watched, thinking, maybe, he could become inured if he just stayed there long enough, alone amidst the loved and the cherished. 

The choir moved through their setlist: “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas,” “Silent Night,” “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” They were just starting in on “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” (which, honestly, was a little cruel to sing to a hotel full of holiday travelers anyway), when Arthur spotted him standing on the far edge of the crowd.

Him. _Eames_. 

 _This can’t be happening. The world is not that small or cruel_ , Arthur thought.

Except it usually was. 

And Arthur knew that better than most. 

He hadn’t seen Eames in six months, not since they’d pulled off inception and fallen into bed together in LA, giddy with disbelief; not since he’d woken up alone on a lazy Friday morning, with no note and no word and an ache in his chest that had been dully thudding for months since. 

Arthur was frozen where he stood. He wanted to scream, he wanted to flee, he wanted to throttle Eames, all in equal measure. Adrenaline flooded into his veins and it felt a lot like drowning (and Arthur knew what drowning felt like, just like he knew what burning to death felt like, and bleeding out, and strangulation…). But before he could run—towards or away, he still wasn’t sure which—Eames, who had been casually surveying the crowd, spotted Arthur, too. 

Eames’s eyes went wide and his mouth parted in disbelief, taking on the look of a startled, stunned animal caught out in the wild. He didn’t blink for a long moment, and then he blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear his vision. Like Arthur could be disappeared so easily. Eames’s eyes cut away from him just long enough to subtly check the exits, and it was that gesture that finally riled Arthur enough to act. 

He stalked through the crowd.

“Mr. Eames.” 

“Arthur.”

“Well, this is quite the coincidence.”

“Is it?” Eames let one eyebrow arch with suspicion. 

“What would you call it?”

“What brings you to Aspen, Arthur?” Eames asked a little sharply. 

“Vacation. Yourself?”

Eames ignored his question. “Do you really go on holiday, Arthur? It’s not a terribly plebeian thing to do?”

 Arthur didn’t go on holiday, not really—the practice didn’t exactly benefit a machine, he thought bitterly—and maybe Eames knew that or maybe he didn’t. Arthur had always made an exception for Christmas, though, and he knew Eames knew that. They’d worked enough jobs together where Arthur had made a point to wrap by mid-December. No more.

But Arthur didn’t want to fight, suddenly. He didn’t want to antagonize Eames, or force him into a confession, a false apology. He was tired. He’d missed Eames—stupidly, irrationally—and he just couldn’t do it. 

“You dropped off the radar,” Arthur said instead. “I could’ve used you on a job last month. We had to settle for Sasha.”

The tight, reverberating string of tension between them, which had been so close to snapping, loosened. Arthur let out some slack. An olive branch. 

“I’m sorry, pet. I know how much you hate kleptomaniacs in the workplace.” 

It wasn’t an apology but it wasn’t an excuse. It was instead, maybe, a kind of truce. Arthur was the best, and they both knew it. If Arthur hadn’t been able to find him, it hadn’t been an accident on Eames's part. And they both knew that, too.

Arthur swallowed everything down—his hurt, his humiliation, his hope.He would forget. He would match Eames’s easy casualness about it all and things could go back to being like they had before. It would kill something in him, Arthur was certain of that, but he’d do it. He’d do any number of things if it meant he could keep Eames, just a little bit. No one had to know. 

Eames had never sold himself as anything other than the Casanova he was—Arthur had extracted no promises from him that night, and Eames had offered none himself. This forgetting would be a compromise. 

“Inside they havefrozen hot chocolate dusted with actual gold powder,” Arthur said, noticing Eames’s empty cup of hot chocolate.  

“Seriously?” Arthur nodded. “Bloody hell. Aspen. Christ.” 

“Yeah, It’s ridiculous. They offer a fucking caviar facial at the spa.” Arthur began to ramble, desperate to stave off any awkward silence. 

“You’re having a laugh.”

“No, really. I’m absolutely serious.”  

Eames narrowed his eyes, his lips pursed. Suddenly a familiar smirk broke through and he said, “You’ve gone and had one, haven’t you? That’s how you know. You’re such a hedonist, Arthur. I’ve always suspected that about you, you know. Skin like a baby’s bottom, you have.”

Arthur laughed, couldn’t help himself, and it loosened the thing in his chest which he now realized was _fear_. Fear that Eames was gone. Fear that they’d never have this again. 

“We can’t all make paisley and three day’s stubble look distinguished.”

“I have it listed under ‘Special Skills’ on my CV.” 

“What are you really doing here, Eames?” Arthur asked quietly, turning away from him to look up at the glittering celestial tapestry laid out across the wide, clear night. He felt unbearably small and exposed in the face of it. 

Eames was quiet for a long moment but Arthur could feel him watching him, and when Arthur looked back, Eames’s eyes were bright and unreadable. Arthur thought—dared to hope, in that breath of a moment, in that charged lull, with the children’s singing coming to a crescendo behind them—Eames might just say, “You. I came here to find you,” at last. But then—

A man, young and pretty, was suddenly at Eames’s side, bearing hot chocolate. “Here you go, Charlie,” he said, handing him a fresh cup. 

Just like that, the scene dissolved.  

"Charlie?" Arthur said, not exactly a question. Charles, the name Eames kept from everyone and always had, for reasons that had only ever been his own. A name Arthur knew, not because he'd been entrusted with it exactly, but because _that's what he did_ and Eames, maybe, had allowed it. Arthur had kept it, too, all these years, from everyone.  

But here it was now, cooed from a stranger's lungs, for anyone  to hear.  Here it was on the lips of a bright-eyed stranger, who was slim and beautiful, whose sweater was Hermes, who was not Arthur. 

“Thanks, darling,” said Eames, a little stiffly. Arthur flinched but Eames had averted his eyes, was smiling painfully sweetly at the new addition. The man linked his arm through Eames’s and leaned in to claim a kiss before turning to Arthur.

“Hello,” he said, his voice betraying a vague edge of possessiveness. 

Arthur felt dazed and naive. What had he been thinking, really? That Eames might—

 That wasn’t real life, and Arthur was very _very_ good at telling what was real, and what was a dream. He’d fingered the die in his pocket the moment he saw Eames across the crowd; he knew the weight of it, the chip on one corner. _Real life._ And here was his _real life_ realization: 

Eames was here, and Arthur was here.

But only one of them was here alone. 

“Sean, this is—“

“—Nathaniel Harris,” Arthur said, sticking out his hand.

Sean took his hand timidly, saying, “Sean McCann.”

“We work together,” Eames explained.

“Oh!” Sean’s face lit up. “That’s fantastic. I’ve never met any of Charlie’s work buddies. What a small world.”

Sean’s voice was light and musical, his accent English of a sort and not unlike what Eames's was once, in early days, before it’d gotten muddled from the day job. Arthur suspected Eames still had it in him, the pure tonal impression of his hometown, but he disguised it now, mixed in a bit of this and a bit of that, throwing people off the trail. But Arthur knew the sound of it, and he’d kept that secret, too. 

“We were just saying the same thing,” said Eames, lightly laughing like that was a joke between them both. “But I know we have a reservation at seven, so we should probably—”

Sean looked at his watched. 

“We do need to go, you’re right, but you should join us for dinner tomorrow, Nathaniel.”

“I’m sure he already has plans, darl—Sean.” Eames’s face screwed up in—what? Anger? Disappointment? Frustration? All in turn, maybe. “Let’s not bother him into dropping them for us.” 

Of course Arthur wasn’t wanted here, not by Eames. It was stupid, because he absolutely didn’t want to suffer an agonizing two hours watching Eames and his paramour steal bites off each other’s forks; but it stung to be so quickly and obviously dismissed.

“Don’t be like that, Charlie. I want to meet more of your friends! Please, Nathaniel. I would really love it if you’d join us.”

Arthur felt _ridiculous_ , watching Eames grimace, trying to urge Sean to drop it. He felt ridiculous and that was Arthur’s least favorite way to feel, and he couldn’t think of anything but Eames's soft bedroom eyes and the small quirk of the corner of his stupid beautiful mouth, shining on someone else. _Ridiculous._ Idiotic. Pathetic. The words chased the blood through his veins and settled into the dark, important parts of him like so much rotten dust. 

This wasn’t him, he had half a mind to think. He was cool, unflappable. Ask anyone who’d heard whisper of his name. Detached. Wasn’t that what he’d decided? And here he had a chance to prove it. 

And suddenly Arthur knew he would go. He would go exactly because he wasn’t wanted, because his very presence seemed to discomfort Eames. He would go and it would be a punishment, not for him, but for Eames, who thought him so easily brushed aside. 

“Yeah, sure. I’d love to,” Arthur said, and he ignored the way Eames’s eyes flashed at him. 

“Fantastic. Let’s say eight o’clock?” 

 

Arthur repeated this as he retreated up to his room, afterward: 

 _I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone_.

 He repeated it like a mantra in his head until the words, the reality of them, didn’t hurt, didn’t mean anything at all. There were worse things than being alone, anyway, he reminded himself, and he knew it wasn’t even a lie. Mostly he liked being alone. He had voluntarily spent much of his adult life alone and had excelled—not _in spite_ of this—but probably _because_ of it. 

But there was a difference in being alone and being lonely, and Arthur had never before felt loneliness quite like this. 

 

 

III.

 

The next morning, with the enormity of the day stretching out before him, Arthur, who hadn't slept in since he was fifteen, slept in, turned away from the window where an eerie white glow framed the edge of the curtains. His body felt heavy in a way he couldn't remember it ever feeling before. 

He didn’t want to get out of bed. He wanted to stay there and stop himself thinking much at all, and especially of the night before and the night to come. 

It was the earthy smell of coffee that eventually compelled him to crawl out from between the layers of warm bedding. A tray had been left on his breakfast table beside a fanned out stack of daily papers--the Times, the Journal, Le Monde. So maybe there was something to be said for a discreet, quick-learning butler. He found a pen in his desk drawer and worked his way through the coffee and a crossword with equal severity and determination. 

The distraction was brief. 

The coffee wore off. 

Arthur sighed angrily into vast, quiet room. 

He didn’t want to _mope_. He didn’t want to fucking _pine_ , god dammit. He was above all of that. He was.

But also there was this, and it was what he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about: Arthur had, once upon a time, been mostly in love with Eames. 

He had been mostly in love with Eames after inception, when he’d said _yes_ to Eames's _let’s go somewhere._ His mother had died, he’d gotten distracted, he’d nearly compromised the entire job, and Eames hadn’t blamed him—had defended, almost, to Cobb—and Arthur was in love with him. He hadn’t wanted to say no anymore, and so he hadn’t. He’d given into Eames (and it had felt exactly like that, in the moment, like a white flag, like surrender, and he’d ignored the part of him that knew that was a bad omen). 

He’d given in and gotten screwed—in both senses of the word.

Arthur had not been what Eames wanted, or at least not what he wanted for more than a night, like a Californian who seeks the snow for exactly three nostalgic days over Christmas before returning to the sun. 

Why hadn’t Eames wanted him? It was the thing he hadn’t been able to answer, not after all this time.

And now there was Sean, who touched Eames in a easy, familiar way and who smiled at him like he’d never had to wonder if Eames would be there in the morning. He was what Eames wanted. 

So Arthur did what he did best. He opened his laptop and went to work on Sean McCann. By the time he needed to get ready for dinner, he knew everything there was to know about him. Except how he’d won Eames’s heart. 

Arthur went to his wardrobe and assembled his sleekest outfit, his battle armor. 

 

The hotel restaurant was warm and full and they were sat in a far corner against a fogged up window that let in just a whisper of a chill. Arthur put on his face, cool with an undercurrent of charm, his body leaning into Sean when they talked, conspiratorially. He showed his dimples. He didn’t flinched when Sean referred to Eames as his boyfriend, or when he lamented their inability to get any good skiing in because “good luck getting him out of bed at seven o’clock in the morning,” or when, upon recounting their day, Sean said, “Did you know the spa has a caviar facial? It’s wonderful,” and touched his own baby-soft cheeks, delighted. Arthur played along throughout. 

“So, tell me. How did you two meet?” Arthur asked when their starters were finished, plates of crumbs and olive oil smudges waiting to be spirited away under their noses. 

“Oh, we’ve known each other forever, haven’t we? Since we were boys really,” Sean answered when it was clear Eames had no interest in the question. “I mean, actually, he was my first kiss.” Eames blushed and looked away. Sean laughed and grabbed up his hand, settling it in his lap under the table in a placating gesture of comfort. 

“Really? Since you were kids? You don’t hear that sort of thing too often these days,” Arthur said, raising his napkin to wipe at his mouth, disguising the pained twist of his lips. Sean smiled at him, flattered and proud. 

 _Since they were kids._  

So this was the person who knew Eames best in the world, who knew where he’d hidden his first pack of smokes and probably remembered the first time he’d been sick from cheap, stolen booze. Maybe he’d seen Eames cry the first time his parents ever disappointed him, or when he first lost something he knew he could never get back. Arthur wanted to ask, but also he didn’t know if he could stand to hear it. It was too much to think of all the bit parts of Eames he’d never know—all the things that made him whole and _him_.

But Arthur also thought, with a sick, sinking feeling, what did that make him? Nothing more than a terrible indiscretion. A lapse in judgement and commitment. 

Had Eames scrubbed himself raw in the airport lounge the morning after before flying home? Had he masked the smell of Arthur with a bottle easily nicked from Duty Free, telling himself nothing like that would ever happen again? Did he regret Arthur in the most basic, irredeemable way? 

As if sensing Arthur’s distress, Eames added quickly, “Though we only recently… rekindled things.” 

“But I think we both always knew that we’d be together in the end.” Sean smiled down at his lap and gave Eames's hand a small squeeze, and he laughed musically when Eames said nothing, as though the silence was something sweet and private shared between them. “He’s not usually this quiet. Is he this quiet at work?”

“Grace under pressure,” Arthur replied, which pleased Sean again, because maybe that’s what being a couple was like—feeling so tied up in another person that their good deeds became your good deeds, and their high praise was your high praise. “Are you in the business, too?” he continued, half-curious, half-obliging. 

“No,” Eames said firmly, finally at attention. He coughed and withdrew his hand from Sean’s lap to scratch at his stubble. A tick. A tell? 

What was their pillow talk like? Did Sean know the story behind each scar, each bullet graze and broken rib? Which tattoos covered burns and hasty stitches in a dirty bathroom in Istanbul?

Arthur had never been able to imagine a relationship with someone outside of Dreamshare—legal qualms aside, there was too much travel, too much secrecy. Except Eames didn’t work like Arthur worked—forging was a speciality in their line of work, something that allowed Eames to pick and choose projects at his leisure. He could return home for long stretches; probably he made it a priority, for Sean’s sake. He’d clearly made it a priority for them to be together at Christmas, at least. Arthur knew there were plenty of jobs on the other side of the world this time of year, if he’d been inclined. 

“I’m not sure the high-stakes world of life insurance is really for me.” Sean chuckled, and Arthur along with him, thinking he was in on the joke. But when caught Eames's eye, he knew.

And the thing was, he didn’t owe it to Eames to play along. Arthur could shake the whole thing apart by squawking his indignation, by bluntly saying, “You know he’s an internationally wanted criminal, right?” And he could smile and smile at the wreckage.

But he wouldn’t. Even he wasn’t cruel enough to take this from Eames, this thing that people spent their whole lives trying to find, nurture, keep. If Eames hadn’t figured out how to be honest with his Sean, he had made his own bed and one day he would lie in it. 

“It’s not for everyone,” Arthur agreed. 

“Anyway, I’m pretty happy at the gallery at the moment.”

“Gallery?” Arthur prompted, playing the fool. 

“He’s a curator at a gallery in London,” Eames said. 

“‘ _A gallery in London’_? It’s the National Gallery, Charles. I know you don’t care about art, but have a little respect.” 

Arthur was momentarily stunned at how ridiculous it was for someone to suggest Eames didn’t care about art. Eames, who carved out time in every new city, in the middle of every job, to spend an afternoon, alone, at a museum. Eames, who had, by his admission, no fewer than half a dozen stolen works from those museums hanging above his bed in the half a dozen apartments he owned across the world.

And that National Gallery—Eames loved it, had gushed to Arthur specifically about it once, when a job had brought them to the outskirts London a few years ago. Eames had crooned and waxed poetic about its treasures. He’d wanted to show Arthur something there, when the job was done. But then the job had gone to shit and they’d both had to go to ground and Arthur couldn’t remember what it was Eames had wanted to show him. Artists, their names, always blurred together in his mind. 

During his research Arthur had assumed this was the foundation of Eames and Sean’s relationship. It seemed like an obvious kindling—a shared love for art. It was something he himself lacked, that kind of bone-deep appreciation of every stroke, every chisel, and he had always been privately disappointed in himself that he couldn’t match Eames’s enthusiasm for the Old Masters, for Rodin, for Jackson Pollock, for any of it. He thought maybe it was one of his great failings in Eames’s eyes, that it spoke to some innate fussiness in him, a lack of passion and romance. He considered—along with a dozen other things, listed and analyzed over the past six months—that it might have been the deal breaker between them.

Little did he know…

First love probably excused all sorts of things, Arthur thought. 

“Right, yes. Sorry. Sean is a junior curator at the National Gallery,” Eames corrected, quite serious. “He’s working on acquiring a—Veron, was it?”

“Veronese,” Sean corrected, amused. 

“A Veronese, yeah.” Eames seemed to be watching Arthur closely, his eyes inscrutable. 

“It was thought lost, actually, this painting, until maybe ten years ago? A little more? Art historians knew about it—it’s mentioned in his journals and there are even a few preliminary drawings of it—but the painting itself had been lost. It’s quite a remarkable story, anyway, how it was found. But it sold immediately to a private collector, is the thing—it’s never been publicly displayed. So we’re securing that right, for the first time.”

“It’s a big deal in the art world,” Eames added. “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to the gallery.” 

“Yes, I suppose this little holiday is the calm before the storm. Do you know anything about art, Nathaniel?”

“Not much, no. Sorry. It sounds fascinating, though.” Arthur had scanned a few articles about it and moved on, disinterested. 

Sean laughed.

“You’re as bad as Charles, then.” 

Arthur shrugged and dropped his eyes. He poked at his cavetelli. He didn’t have much of an appetite but it seemed rude to say so. Eames had put away two glasses of wine since they’d sat down and had barely touched is own dish, a succulent Brandt bone-in ribeye seared in olive oil. Arthur fancied he saw Eames's hand shake just for a moment, the last time he’d reached for the wine, his fingers dumb and smeared with ketchup (so uncouth). He left bright red fingerprints on the neck of the bottle, which bothered Arthur but no one else seemed to notice.

Arthur would forget to keep being polite and charming and interested if he drank much more, but he didn’t know what else to do, and he, too, poured himself more wine. 

“And what’s funny is Charles actually wanted to be an artist, for maybe a week, when we were kids.” Sean smirked at Eames as though just remembering this.

“A passing fancy,” Eames said.

“Clearly.”

Arthur felt irrationally angry then, because Eames _was an artist_. What he could do in dreams _was art_ , was as impressive as any Titan or Vermeer or fucking _lost Veronese._ Arthur thought Sean must not know Eames at all, and that made him angry anew, and even sad, that Eames would settle for someone who would never tell him just how beautiful the things he could create were, because they’d never know. Eames deserved better than that, and Arthur would never be able to tell him.

Suddenly everything about this felt wrong, and the way Eames’s eyes lighted on Sean felt wrong, and the way Sean’s hand settle on Eames’s wrist when he reached again for the wine bottle felt wrong. 

Arthur felt like he was missing something big, something obvious—

—But Arthur was on the outside, all alone, in the dark. This wasn’t a job, they weren’t on a team. If Eames was playing at something else, Arthur was not the person Eames would confide in. 

“I’m sure you guys have missed him out in the field,” Sean said after a moment, his soup spoon hitting the porcelain bottom of his bowl of chowder, “but I’m thankful every day that Charlie was able to come home when he did.” Eames eyes went a little wide and worried. 

“Sean…”

“I am, though. I mean, we knew each other as boys but, well I guess we both went away to school when we were 11? And we didn’t see each other much then, and then less once I’d gone off to uni and Eames to London. We hadn’t spoken in years, but when he heard my mother was sick he dropped everything. The whole family, we’re just so grateful. He’s really been my rock these past few months. So I’m glad you lot have been able to live without him for a while.”

Arthur swallowed hard and put down his wine, suddenly cold. His mind went blank. Suddenly he was unable to put up with this farce any longer. He couldn’t offer a sympathetic smile or tilt of his head at that, not when he’d been so alone when his own mother had gotten sick. He’d had absolutely no one in the world to hold his hand while he held her’s, brittle and loose, slipping away in ugly, startling steps. There had been no childhood love to return to his side, no rock. He was done with this, whatever this was. He brought his napkin to his mouth and held it there until he was certain he wouldn’t be sick.

“I—“ he started.

“Art—Nathaniel.” Eames reached out, trying to grab his hand, his wrist, anything. Arthur shook him off and stood.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I need to…” He reached for his wallet and dropped three $20s on the table. 

The noise of the dining room pressed against him as he fled and he couldn’t hear Eames calling after him. He felt exposed, rubbed raw and too sensitive for the hotel’s obnoxious holiday cheer, for its loud tinsel and fake evergreen boughs, falsely frosted with thick white paint and glitter. The gingerbread rendering of the hotel was all hardened red icing and toughened gumdrops. He wanted to tear the red velvet bows from the lights and snap the piano strings so he’d never have to hear “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” again. 

When he made it into the elevator he closed his eyes and breathed and breathed and didn’t listen to the “Arthur!” being shouted across the lobby right before the doors closed. 

He made it back to his suite on unsteady legs. Housecleaning had been and gone and the curtains were tied back, illuminating the otherwise dark room with tiny colored lights reflected through the glass from the tree outside. When he turned on the rest of the lights, the fireplace crackled to life. Arthur liked the smell of wood burning.

His breakfast tray was gone but his copy of the _Times_ was spread out in its stead. Seized by the startling need to destroy something, Arthur grabbed up the paper and tore up whole sections, letting them fall to the floor around him in shreds. Business, Opinion, Sports, one after the other. Before he could finish there was a knock at his door, gentle but insistent, and the fight went out of him. He dropped what remained into the trash on his way across the room. 

Through the peephole he saw Eames, his head leaning forward to rest against the door. “Arthur,” he said quietly into the wood. “Arthur, please, open up.” And while Arthur stood there silently, watching him, he suddenly straightened up and brought his fist down against the door again, hard. It jolted Arthur back.

“Arthur! I know you’re in there. I know you’re there. Please, open up.”

Arthur couldn’t.

“Arthur, let me explain. Pet. Please, just open the door. Let me explain.”

Arthur wouldn’t. 

“Arthur, Arthur,” Eames chanted sadly, his knuckles rapping against the door in tiny musical bursts. “Please.”

Arthur leaned against his side, pressing his hand against the wood. He wanted Eames. He wanted him so badly and he didn’t have him and he couldn’t have him and he was alone. 

“Darling…” Eames whispered, so close, just an inch between them. Arthur slumped to the floor. He didn’t cry. He didn’t.

In the end, eventually, it was quiet on the other side, and Arthur passed out.

 

 

IV. 

 

When Arthur blinked awake it was Christmas Eve and he was warm in bed and Eames was staring at him from the other side of the room where he was sat in a chair.

His face was unreadable and Arthur cursed that he could do that, assume a mask, disappear—Arthur had seen him do it plenty often to all sorts of people. Just never to him. Until now.

“What are you doing here?” Arthur said, his throat croaky from sleep.

“Thief, remember?”

“Are you stealing me?”

“I picked your lock.” 

Arthur nodded like that was acceptable, expected even. 

“You didn’t answer me.”

“Good game, Arthur. Very nicely played.” Eames voice was cold, mean even, and Arthur was suddenly completely awake. “It was smart, playing the victim like that, moping around like some lovelorn kicked little puppy.”

“Eames, I—“

“Shut up, Arthur. Just shut up. Don’t. I _knew_ it couldn’t be a coincidence, you here. I _bloody_ _knew it_.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Eames.” 

“Don’t play dumb, _darling_ , it doesn’t suit you.” 

Arthur sat up, feeling wrong-footed and out of his depth. Eames followed suit. 

“Don’t call me ‘darling,’ asshole.”

“Then tell me what you’re fucking doing _here_ , in _this hotel_ , talking up _Sean bloody McCann_ over plates of over-prized Italian food? You want me to think that was all coincidence? You never eat carbs,” Eames said sharply, his face sour. 

Arthur was quiet for a long minute because, well, _yes_ , it was a coincidence, a spectacular, ugly coincidence, but he didn’t understand why Eames should be quite so distraught over it. Arthur had played nice, he’d _played along_. He hadn’t ruined anything for Eames, as much as he had considered it. 

“Eames, I’m not—!” But before Arthur could defend himself again, Eames threw something at Arthur and he flailed, caught off guard. A newspaper. The goddamn Arts section, which Arthur apparently hadn’t shredded. Sean’s face stared back up at him from the front page. An older gentleman, bearing a resemblance, stood a few feet away, and between them on an easel stood a painting, covered over with cloth. The lost Veronese, hidden until the time was right. 

Arthur read the headline: “LOST WORK FROM GREAT MASTER TO BE UNVEILED NEXT MONTH AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY” and the caption: “McCann and son procured the painting from a private collector for an yet undisclosed amount.”

“And before you try and pass _that_ off as coincidence, too, I’ve seen your fucking browser history. You were awfully thorough.”

Was Eames about to call him out for being a pathetic, pining mess? It had crossed a line, probably, to research Sean like that, but that was what Arthur _did._ It was the only way he knew to cope when he felt out of his depth. 

“Who are you working for?” Eames asked, barreling on. Arthur didn’t say anything, just shook his head. “This is _mine_ , Arthur! Who fucking sent you?” Arthur, as he so rarely was in front of Eames, was he was speechless. Eames searched his eyes, his mouth tight. 

“He’s a _mark_?” Arthur asked. 

“Yes, he’s a bloody a mark, Arthur. What did you…?” 

Eames trailed off and his whole face fell. Arthur turned away, wrapping his arms around himself. He felt out of sorts in his jeans and his stupid sweater. He wanted his suits back. He wanted to be sharp again, and clever, _to be the best_. He wanted to understand what fuck was going on. 

“Arthur…”

“Don’t.” Arthur scrambled off the bed and marched into the front room. He heard Eames come up behind him but he stayed quiet, processing. 

“Arthur. Of course he’s a mark.”

“You were his first kiss. He’s in love with you.”

“Did you not get the memo that we’re not good men, you and I?” Eames said, his voice quiet and harsh. 

Arthur would’ve said the same thing. They were not good men. They did bad things for bad people and profited from it. But there had always been a small part of him, buried deep, that didn’t want to believe that. That held out hope that maybe he was wrong, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. That _that_ wasn’t the whole story. It was the part that had breathed a sigh of relief when he returned home each Christmas and his mother wrapped him up in her arms like he was still so small, and had whispered to him just how much he was loved. 

It hurt in a new, shattering way, to hear Eames dismiss their lives so flippantly.

“You thought it was real.” It wasn’t a question, so Arthur didn’t answer like it was. “Good. Then he should, too.” Arthur had never before heard Eames sound like he did then, rough and used and full of ugly, slow-burning spite. Arthur ached for the loss of something he couldn’t define. 

“What’s the job?” 

"Do you know why forgers do what they do, Arthur?” Eames went to the window, parted the curtains and looked out. Arthur was silent. “It’s not about the money. Everyone thinks it is but it’s not. The money’s nice, and maybe it’s why you keep doing it, but it’s never why you start.” 

The fire was dead in the hearth but the room was warm, still—central heating. Eames turned back to Arthur. 

“It’s revenge. You always get into it for revenge.”

“Eames…”

“Sean, he was right last night, when he said I had wanted to be an artist when I was young. A painter. It’s what I wanted most in the world. I would lock myself in my room for days. My mum would leave meals at my door and sometimes I’d pick at them but mostly I wouldn’t. I never wanted to stop, even for a moment. When I was 16 I brought some of my favorite pieces to Sean’s father—he ran the National Gallery and I thought, you know, he should know if they were any good. He’d be able to help. Write me a recommendation for a real art course, maybe help with a scholarship. I didn’t know. I was a dreamer.

“Anyway, he hated them. He just—he eviscerated them, right in front of me. Told me they weren’t worth the acrylics I’d painted them with. He called me a—he said I always had been a brute of a boy, with no real taste or discernment or refinement, and that I always would be, and that because of that I’d be untrainable.Said I’d be better off becoming a mechanic or a plumber, something practical and useful.” 

Eames was fiddling now, with the hem of his turtleneck and with his watch. He cracked his knuckles. 

“So I just thought, you know, I’ll teach myself, then. And the best way I knew to teach myself was to copy all the Great Works, and I did. I was twenty, living in some shit place in Hackney, and I about gave my flatmate a heart attack one day when he walked in and thought I’d stolen the fucking Mona Lisa, which I had propped up on our sofa, drying. After that I got it into my head and couldn’t get it out, the idea of forging. 

“I forged that Veronese, Arthur, they one they’re going to put on display. I was angry and I forged it and there’s a time bomb in it. I was 23. I made sure it’d fall into Sean’s father’s hands and I thought he’d make some big deal about it, put it up in the gallery and when someone realized it was a fake, he’d be disgraced. But he didn’t put it up in the gallery, he bloody sold it under the table to some old Russian Oligarch for a million pounds and then bought it back at half the price from his estate when the bloke died. And _now_ it’s finally going up in the gallery and I can finally—“

“—You’re going to reveal it’s a fake,” Arthur interrupted.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing with Sean then?”

“I need to see if he knows it’s a fake, or if his father suspects anything. He really is quite respected in his profession, Sean. If I can get him to reassure his father of its legitimacy…”

Sean was a pawn, then. Nothing more. Somehow it didn’t make Arthur feel any better. He felt uneasy, seeing this side of Eames— he had always seemed to Arthur like someone who let everything roll so easily off his back. Arthur hadn’t pegged him as the sort to hold grudges, not like this. 

“Who are you working with?” Arthur asked, suddenly realizing… “Do you even have a team?”

Eames looked askance, not meeting Arthur’s eye.

“You were going to try and incept him yourself? Someone who loves you, trusts you?” 

Eames, at least, flinched at that, and Arthur surged forward, suddenly so certain that he needed to stop this, that he needed to save Eames from himself. 

“Don’t do this, Eames. Just… don’t. You’ll be arrested. When you reveal it’s a fake, when you tell him _you_ did it—because of course you fucking will, that’s what revenge means—he’ll bring you down with him.”

Eames shrugged. “I’m good at getting out sticky situations.”

“But not at home,” Arthur said earnestly. “You don’t pull this stuff in London—I know you don’t—because you don’t want to risk it. If you do this, Eames, you won’t be able to go back.”

Arthur reached out carefully and touched Eames face with the tips of his fingers, just to make him look up at him.

“It’s not worth it. Trust me. It’s no good, not being able to go home, Eames.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when your mum was sick,” Eames said, quietly and sincerely. 

“You didn’t know.” 

“I should have, though.” 

Arthur had mentioned, regrettably, during their night together. He had been gifted Eames's sad, pitying eyes in return. 

“Don’t do this, Eames. Don’t do the extraction. Leave Sean and his family alone. Leave the painting alone. If there’s a time bomb in it, someone else will find it. Keep London.” It seemed ridiculous to say, _Keep your soul_ , because they were criminals, they’d done so much worse than this, in the grand scheme of things. But Arthur thought it all the same, thought that if Eames did this, he wouldn’t come back from it. It would change him. Revenge, sought out and fulfilled, did that. 

Eames might think they were rotten at the core but Arthur, he knew differently. And he knew differently because he’d had someone once who had made him believe differently. Eames deserved to have someone do the same for him. Despite what had happened between them, and despite how he’d hurt him, Arthur would do this for Eames, because everyone deserved to know how it felt to be loved—wholly and completely—at Christmas. 

“Eames.” Arthur stepped close and Eames, his chest heaving, looked at Arthur with wide eyes, both sad and hopeful and full of so many different regrets. 

“Stay with me,” Arthur whispered. “Spend Christmas with me. Stay with me.” 

“Darling”—Eames pressed against him, lined their bodies up from toe to tip and _consumed_ him—“Yes.”

 

Later, when they were sprawled out together in Arthur’s bed, Eames asked, “How do you break up with someone on Christmas Eve?” His voice was rough and restrained, as though he regretting having to bring the consideration into the room. It had been easy, in the pale fragile light of morning, to pretend away many things.

But Arthur was practical, above all else, and he had a soft spot for tying up loose ends. He’d been expecting the question. “With a peace offering,” he said, tracing his fingers over Eames's bared chest, re-drawing the tattoos there, soothing out scarred ridges and smooth burns, remembering their stories. “Tell Sean the painting is a fake. Tell him how he can prove it. If he loves you, I don’t believe he will sell you out to his father. Just, give him a running head start and he can decide how he wants to spin the whole thing. With that Russian dead—you said his father sold the painting under the table; I’m sure there’s no paper trail—it’ll be easy enough to pass the blame onto his estate, suggest they were the one trying to pawn off the fake. Sean can announce to the art world he was able to prove it’s a forgery and he’ll be the hero.”

Eames lay there thinking quietly for a long while as Arthur’s hands continued to roam, mapping where he was strong and where he’d begun to go soft, where broken bones hadn’t quite set, where things still—would always—hurt. Arthur kissed his chest over his heart, sweet and lingering and possessive. He whispered, “Mine,” whispered into his skin, or maybe he only thought it and that was the wind. Eames settled his hand in Arthur’s hair and petted, scratched his nails along his scalp and his loosening curls until Arthur practically mewed. 

“I better bugger off, then.”

“Yeah.” Arthur shifted and draped his weight heavily over Eames's side, tucking close under Eames's arm, which easily wrapped around his shoulder to hold him there. 

“Really, I mean it.”

“I know you do,” Arthur drawled, tangling his legs with Eames's, locking their sweat-sticky bodies together. The room was too warm now, between the hotel’s heating and Arthur’s three layers of blankets, and _them_ , their bodies, which had moved so guilelessly and easily, thefriction heating them up like so much kindling gone to flame. He didn’t want to let it go, not yet. But he would.

Eames made a disgruntled noise and burrowed deep into the covers, throwing the duvet over both of their heads until they were hidden from everything except each other. “I will come back,” he promised in the dark, just able to make out the gleam of Arthur’s narrow eyes, the frown line between his brows. “I promise.”

“Okay.”

“And you'll be here when I get back?" Eames asked, as though he was suddenly, actually worried.

"I'll be here."

Eames smiled and smiled then, and kissed him like there were no first times and no last times, like there had only ever just been _this, them,_ perfect and whole, as it was meant to be. 

“Then we’ll go, you and I.”

“Yes. We’ll go.” Arthur knew what Eames meant. It was their instinct, after all, when a job was all said and done: to run and keep running. To split up. To go to ground. Except not this time, not quite.

They'd run, all right. But they'd run together.

Eames extracted himself from the bed at last and was gone, and Arthur breathed in and out, loud and rhythmic, reminding himself he was awake. He wouldn’t reach for his die. He _knew_ he was awake. It was only Christmas Eve and Eames would come back to him this time. He knewit. 

Arthur spent the rest of the afternoon making arrangements—a car, a pair of plane tickets—and repaying kindnesses to the hotel staff. He walked through the lobby with his dimples showing, and if he stopped every now and then and touched his fingers to lips, and had to convince himself again that the morning had really happened, he was fine with it. He passed Santa Claus coming in from the cold, clean shaven and missing his hat and smelling of the Starbucks holiday menu, and maybe Arthur thought, just for a second, about Christmas wishes and miracles, and how sweet it was to believe. Just for a morning. Just for a day. 

He took his time folding and stacking his sweaters, his pressed shirts, his denim. His shoes went in first, sat the bottom of his bag, then the rest. Arthur zipped everything up and waited in the living room until there was a knock at his door. 

Eames practically collapsed against him, heavy and sudden, when he opened it to him. Arthur stumbled back but wrapped his arms around him without a thought, taking his weight. Eames had come back. Arthur was still there. Just as they both had said. 

Eames breathed loudly and hotly against Arthur’s sweater, inhaled his cologne. There was a bag near his feet, and he had a candy cane clutched in one hand. 

“Here,” Eames said, offering the candy to Arthur when he finally pulled away. 

Arthur decided he didn’t need to ask Eames how it’d gone: his face showed everything—the exhaustion, the resignation, the relief. It seemed enough to pull Eames back into his arms and hold him there a minute longer. Two minutes. 

Arthur took the proffered candy as they stepped apart and hooked it in his front pocket, blatantly ignoring at the same time Eames's festive outfit: he had thrown on an atrocious fur coat over his even more atrocious holiday sweater featuring a misshapen Rudolph stretched across his front. The attached red bell nose bobbed up and down and jingled against his chest as he maneuvered around to help Arthur with his bags. But this was Eames, Arthur thought, and he wanted all of him.

“Never say I’m not a gentleman, darling. It’s absolutely the only thing of value my parents gave me,” Eames said, flashing his crooked, dully white teeth at Arthur. So Arthur didn’t say anything, just handed over one bag and then the other, and they headed downstairs to check out. Their car was waiting.

“You didn’t say anything about my outfit,” Eames said later, as they left town behind and headed toward the airport. “I rely on you to comment on my sartorial choices, darling, otherwise what’s the point?” 

Arthur snatched up Eames's hand in his own and locked their fingers together, palm to palm.

 

 

V.

 

They would go to California, it had been decided, on tickets purchased for a Mr. Nathaniel B. Harris and a Mr. Alfred R. Cohen. Arthur had asked Eames if he wanted go back to England, to the grey damp country and the family he had there, but Eames had been firm in his dismissal, told Arthur he could choose, and Arthur chose this. They were settled into First with warm towels and cool glasses of champagne, and Eames beamed at Arthur as they took off .

“Go on, then. Will I get to learn all of your aliases now?”

Arthur considered this as he finished his wine, looking out his window at the dim sky, the lights of small mountain towns falling away from them. “One of these days, Mr. Eames.”

And that had been close enough to a promise for Eames.

It was early evening when they touched down in Los Angeles. Arthur took the lead, bringing them through the hoards of frazzled last-minute travelers on their way to and from, weighed down with the excitement and trepidation that time with one's family brings, in equal measure. The taxi stand was a mess with families wrangling presents and strollers into too-small trunks, but Arthur and Eames waited, and it wasn't excruciating. Arthur, for his part, listened to the long-distant sounds of home, the noise of traffic let loose into a wide sky without towers to trap it. Eames seemed mostly content just to watch Arthur, in an element--his element--he'd never before been allowed to see him .

Reaching the front of the queue, Arthur gave an address to the driver, who smelled like tea-tree oil and nodded mutely. Arthur laid his open hand palm-up atop his bags, which were sandwiched between them both in the backseat, and Eames again settled his where it belonged, just so. They were mostly quiet as the car pulled away and merged onto the endless roads of America's great sprawling metropolis, headlights and taillights and too-quick break lights and too-few turn signals guiding them through. Arthur watched it all go by out the smeared window: the dusty stucco buildings and cracked sidewalks, palm trees and power lines, smog curling around shopping carts piled high with god-knows-what, abandoned near alleyways.

"I've never been to L.A. before," Eames said. Arthur gave him a look, incredulous. "I mean, aside from the once. That one, life-changing time." He smirked and simultaneously looked sincere; an ability that was singularly Eames's own. "You would've thought I'd reached the promised land with how it felt to actually be standing there at baggage claim, alive. Staring at you."

"Lots of people feel that about California, right? It's the dream." Arthur smiled, watching Eames in the fading light. “I always knew I'd leave, though. Like, as a kid, I always knew I'd leave. But I also always thought I'd come back. Eventually. I don't know now."

"You're here now."

Too little too late, Arthur thought, and was quiet for a second, wondering honestly if this would be the last time he ever came "home". He decided that if it was going to be the last time, what a last time. To be here, with Eames, on Christmas. Arthur squeezed Eames's hand and said, "That's insane. I can't believe you'd never been to L.A. before that."

They drove on for an hour or more with the city outside parched and sun-stroked. Arthur asked that they stop at a grocery store so he could run inside for the makings of a poor man’s Christmas dinner.

"Here is just fine," Arthur said later as the cab pulled up outside of a small faded-blue ranch-style house with a dying lawn on a quiet street. The front was largely obscured by limp sugar pines. Arthur slid his credit card through the machine on the back window and climbed out. The neighborhood hummed mildly with life, the electric buzz of multi-colored Christmas lights stapled along rain gutters, faraway music sneaking out behind golden windows.

"Where are we?" Eames asked, following Arthur.

"Pasadena."

Arthur watched the cab disappear down the street before turning back to the straggly house. There was a FOR SALE sign forced into the grass with a SOLD sticker plastered over it.

"Darling... have you bought us a house...?"

"No. But I am breaking us into a house that someone else recently bought," said Arthur, starting up the driveway. He cleared the three front steps in a single stride and rummaged in his coat until he withdrew a small lock-picking kit. He hunched over and set to work.

"And here I was thinking I was the one with the flexible moral code," The lock heaved and clicked prettily and Eames said in admiration, "Well, that was certainly quick."

"I've had some practice." Arthur pushed open the door to reveal: nothing much at all. "I used to live here."

"This is your..."

"Was my. Home. Yeah. I sold it last month to a young couple from Seattle. They’re moving in after Christmas.” 

The house was dark inside, and cold in a way houses in Los Angeles so rarely are—cold from the mild drop in temperature, sure, but more than that, cold from emptiness, the narrow halls and sprawling rooms quiet and sterile.

Arthur had made swift work of it after the funeral. So many boxes for such a small house and a too-short life, is mostly what he remembered of the ordeal. He had a storage unit in Echo Park—had for years—and he was able to save a few boxes—family photos, the pearls her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday, her wedding ring, incomplete journals and day planners—snapshots of their tiny life together. Some paper work—a marriage certificate, death certificates, a birth certificate—the last piece of anything to show his real name. He locked it away. The rest went to Goodwill or the dump, and Arthur had told himself not to cared because she wasn’t there anymore to tell him it wasn’t a bad thing, caring.

(That had been the first step, looking back. The first step down the road that had brought him to Aspen.)

It was all gone now, and he fancied his footsteps down the front hall echoed like an archeologist stepping deeper and deeper into a grave-robbed tomb. 

Eames didn’t say anything for a minute, letting Arthur lead them into the house. He paused in the living room, unsure of where to go from there. The wood floors showed a thin layer of dust where slates of light had fought their way inside around the crooked blinds. The walls were blank, the fireplace empty. A few shabby pieces of furniture had remained behind, sold with the house.

“This isn’t you at all, is it, darling?” Eames flapped his hand at Arthur’s person, his slicked back hair, his sharp coat, his polished Oxfords, and sat down on the living room couch, looking a little lost. 

“I spent every Christmas in this house, my whole life,” Arthur began, looking around. “You know, it was never much, but it was enough. We’d aways have this squat plastic tree on our kitchen table and we’d wrap our gifts in newspaper—and they were always small things, simple things. Stupid things I made in art class when I was a kid or—one year I drafted an architectural sketch of the house and framed it, and she had that thing hanging above the fireplace for years. She’d knit me scarfs and sweaters, like we lived back East or something, or she’d make silly little coupons like, ‘Good for one free weekend of blowing off your chores to spend all day at the beach.’ When I was 18 she gave me access to a savings account she’d been paying into since I was born, for college, and it was just enough to cover a year at MIT. On Christmas Eve we would make these cookies from a recipe of my grandma’s—she called them gingerbread but they were more molasses than gingerbread and they smelled like coffee—and we’d eat them for breakfast on Christmas morning, and then we’d have Chinese for Christmas dinner.”

“Sounds nice,” Eames said carefully. 

“It wasn’t much,” Arthur repeated. “But it was enough.” 

Eames hummed, unsure. 

“We get these ideas about ourselves sometimes, Eames, and we don’t question them because—well, who could know us better than we know ourselves? But sometimes other people do.” Arthur sat down beside Eames and took up his hand. “My mom was like that. She knew who I really was, and she knew what I looked like when I started thinking of myself as something else, and she’d always call me on it. I’d come back here, come home, and she’d throw her arms around me and I’d remember: the me I was out there, on the job—it wasn’t the me I was here, at home. She was my anchor so that even when I went back out there pretending, I wouldn’t forget, because I’d know there was someone back home who knew the me I really was.”

Arthur kissed the back of Eames’s hand, kissed along his knuckles. “I was worried, with her gone, that I might lose sight of myself. But I’m not scared of that anymore.”

Eames breathed out a shaky sigh. 

“We do bad things. We do, there’s no denying that. But it’s not who we _are_ , it’s not all that we are. My mom never knew exactly what I did, but I think she knew it wasn’t totally aboveboard. But she still loved me, and she allowed me to be bigger and more complicated than whatever mean summation I might’ve made of myself or my life. We are more than the bad things we’ve done, Eames.” 

“Everything good thing I’ve ever had in my life, I’ve broken,” Eames said, staring at Arthur with a miserable pout on his lips. “Art—my first good thing—I perverted it and made it into a weapon. And you—I—“ he broke off, pulling his hand back so he could bury his face in both of them. 

“You didn’t break me,” Arthur said, which wasn’t absolutely true, but it also wasn’t a lie. He had been hurt by what Eames had done—he’d felt trampled by it, burned and bruised black and blue by it, maybe—but he wasn’t broken. He was still whole. They both were.

“It was easier to leave than to stay and watch it fall apart in my hands,” Eames said, scrubbing at his face. “Because it would have fallen apart.”

Eames seemed to reconsider that as soon as it was out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry, that was a shit thing to say. Especially here, to you, on Christmas Eve.”

“Maybe it would’ve fallen apart. I don’t have any particular track record to boast of, Eames. I don’t know about you. But I don’t think you should throw away something that could be good, just because you think you don’t deserve it.”

“You don’t know all the things I’ve done, Arthur.”

“No, I don’t. Maybe one day you’ll tell me, or maybe you won’t. But I do know you didn’t destroy Sean’s life today, or his father’s. You had the choice to and you didn’t. If you want me, you can have me, Eames. I don’t know if I’m a good thing anymore or if I was ever, but you can have me. I won’t break.”

“Arthur…”

“Or, well, if you don’t, not like that—“ Arthur started to backpedal, scared and aloof. “We only each need one person who knows us, truly; someone who can remind us who we are when we forget ourselves. I could still be your person, Eames. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that.”

“I knew, the first second I saw you, you were something brand new,” Eames said. “You walked into that warehouse in Taiwan in a three-piece suit with a bloody watch chain and a tie pin, and I knew. I thought, here is freshly turned soil and a barely set foundation. And I wondered what had been razed in order for this person to exist, this you. I never stopped wondering who you were, before you were the “you” you let people see.”

Arthur was a little stunned and very quiet.

“And now I know. You were this.” Eames cupped his palms under Arthur’s jaw and pressed his thumbs to where Arthur’s dimples would show, had he been smiling. 

“I want you so very much, Arthur,” Eames whispered. 

“That’s good,” Arthur said, and pressed his mouth to Eames’s in a deep, biting kiss. Eames kissed him back, and it was sweet, and his mouth tasted like peppermint candy. It was nothing like the last time, which had been sharp and hard, an eruption of pent-up pressure against a yielding body. This was like melting. Eames slid an arm around Arthur’s waist and pulled him close, held him up, and wrapped his other arm around his back, and their lips and their tongues pressed and retreated and danced against each other carefully, delicately, en pointe. 

“I’m so sorry,” Eames said sadly when they pulled apart. Arthur shhh’d him gently and raked his fingertips through Eames’s hair, along his scalp. 

“It’s okay, Eames. It’s okay. I forgive you.” 

Eames nodded and was quiet for a moment as his hands trailed over Arthur in a similar, comforting survey. 

“Thank you,” he finally said.

“Eames, you don’t have to—“

“No, darling. Let me. _Thank you_. For everything. Thank you for bringing me home for Christmas.” 

“I know it’s not exactly what most people would have in mind—“

“Arthur.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you,” Eames said again, taking Arthur’s face in his hands. He landed a gentle kiss on his forehead and one at each dimple, before their lips met and made vows of devotion. 

When they broke apart, Arthur thought about how lucky he was. Not just to have Eames, and not just to have him _here_ , but how lucky he was to get to feel happy in this house again, one last time. A place he’d given away for its ghosts. 

Arthur fetched the wine he’d bought earlier—a nice California cab, the first wine he’d ever learned to like—and Eames draped his ridiculous $90,000 sable fur coat over the couch of them, curled up on the couch—a coat, he assured Arthur, he’d nicked from an atrocious old hag in the St. Regis billiard room. “Would you like to hear the story?” he asked, as they passed the bottle of wine between them, and then he told Arthur, and Arthur’s cheeks hurt from laughing. 

It got late. They sank into their haphazard bed and began to whisper, for no other reason than the dark seemed to require it. They filled the air between them with admissions and promises, preciously held memories and rarely recalled stories. Eames said, “I’ve wanted you since…” and Arthur said, “I’ve wanted you since…” and they both said why they’d never said.

In the morning Arthur drowsily whispered, “Merry Christmas” into Eames's skin, trailing his thin, eager lips across his jaw, down his neck. His hands pulled at and shifted Eames's sleep-heavy body onto his back so Arthur could crawl over him, crawl down him, his kisses leaving damp marks that cooled and chilled in the morning air, making Eames shiver. Making Eames moan, and hold Arthur in place, and curse, and finally return, “Happy Christmas, Arthur. Bloody hell.”

Later Eames dug through Arthur’s bags and exclaimed: 

"Arthur, did you buy Christmas crackers? You can _get_ Christmas crackers in the States?”

"They were on sale. Probably no one in American knows what they are, which makes sense because they're ridiculous." 

"You got us Christmas crackers." Eames looked thoroughly, irrationally charmed.

“I wanted to get you _something_ that might, I don’t know, make you feel like it was Christmas.”

"Oh darling, you should see me in a crown."

Arthur laughed and pulled out a tray of dry, store-bought cinnamon rolls for them for breakfast, fixing them up in the microwave as well as he could. He picked at one and Eames devoured two, his fingers sticky and glistening. He kissed Arthur with a bite still in his mouth, hot, sweet—

“Disgusting,” Arthur scolded, smiling. 

“I’ll make you pancakes next year.” Eames met his smile, tooth for tooth. “Make a note of that, yeah? Next year’s house needs to have a proper well-equipped kitchen.” Eames's eyes lit up, childlike. “Oh! And maybe a tree! I bet you could find us one with a tree, and mistletoe. You know, a nice little family who’s decorated the place like a Christmas advert and buggered off to grandma’s for the holiday.” 

“Are you proposing we make a tradition of breaking into empty houses on Christmas?”

“I can think of worse traditions.”

“Like?” 

“Um. Circumcision? I always thought that one sounded a bit rubbish.”

 "I'm telling Santa and/or the authorities that it was you who lead me into this life of depravity and crime.”

“It would be my pleasure, darling.” 

 

 


End file.
